“He Wanted to Kill a Policeman”

The photos below show the southwest quadrant of the intersection of Berry Street and South Riverside Drive—land once owned by the Ellis family. In 1959 Towne Plaza South shopping center was built on that quadrant.

But by 2008 the center was vacant.

And by 2021 nothing remained except a grass-grown parking lot, as if jackhammers and bulldozers had tried to remove the stain of that night.

Fifty years ago today Fort Worth’s top local crime story of 1971 occurred on this site.

Some back story:

In 1970 the shopping center played musical stores: White’s auto store moved from its space in the center at 3140 South Riverside to 3100, a space formerly occupied by a Skillern’s drugstore. The space at 3140 was converted into a two-part nightclub: the Electric Circus. A Plexiglas partition divided the club into an adult section and a teenage section.

Star-Telegram columnist Tony Slaughter announced the opening of the Electric Circus in October 1970.

Note that across the intersection a Buddie’s supermarket was being built between the Woolco store and Montgomery Ward’s Ward’s Plaza.

The nightclub quickly became popular, crowded even on weekday nights.

When a Star-Telegram reader asked answerman Ed Brice if the Electric Circus was “safe,” he replied that juvenile officers had never received a complaint.

That was about to change.

On April 20 three people were arrested after a “disturbance” involving 250-300 people broke out at the Electric Circus. One man was thrown through a window.

On July 6 “an unruly crowd of 200 or more” created another disturbance at the nightclub. Several buildings and a police car were damaged. Gunshots were fired. A nightclub security guard was injured when he tried to break up a fight.

Fast-forward to October 17, 1971. On the parking lot of a bar on Camp Bowie Boulevard, three teenagers broke into a pickup and stole a tape player, shotgun, and rifle. The Springfield .30-06 military rifle had been modified with a telescopic sight, shortened barrel, and sportsman stock. One of the teenagers, Lee Lagrone, fourteen, later said the teenagers sold the rifle to David Lee Nelson, eighteen, for $25. Nelson lived in the Riverside Village Apartments less than quarter-mile north of the Electric Circus.

Fast-forward eleven days. October 28 was a Thursday. Nonetheless the Electric Circus was crowded that night. Shortly after midnight—October 29, two nights before Halloween—Fort Worth police officers responded to a report that a group of men was holding a dice game in front of the nightclub.

As police were breaking up the dice game, Herbert Lee Northfleet Jr. came out of the nightclub.

Northfleet, intoxicated, told the police officers “to let those fellows shoot the dice.”

Northfleet told one of the officers that he was going to “kick” him.

When the officers arrested Northfleet, he recalled, “I started tussling with them because I didn’t want to go to jail.”

So, of course, Northfleet went to jail.

A friend, Patty Clark, was preparing to get into a car parked near the nightclub. She intended to go downtown to secure Northfleet’s release from jail.

As she was leaving, she recalled, she saw a young man carrying a rifle.

Meanwhile Northfleet’s arrest had triggered a “riot” in which about 150 nightclub patrons threw bottles and rocks, broke windows, and kicked and spit on police officers.

Gunshots were fired inside the nightclub. Thomas Lee Prince, a nightclub security guard, recalled that he heard “bullets striking the walls. It was sporadic and seemed to come from a number of guns.”

Two patrons, Kenneth Wayne Harris, twenty-three, and Mrs. Debra Brooks, nineteen, were shot when Harris stepped into the line of fire of a man who was trying to shoot a security guard. Harris was shot in the mouth; Mrs. Brooks was grazed on her forehead.

When ambulance attendants arrived, patrons in the nightclub taunted them, swung at them, and tried to kick them as the attendants put Harris on the stretcher to take him away.

Harris was hospitalized in serious condition. Mrs. Brooks was treated at a hospital and released.

Meanwhile about twenty police officers had arrived to help quell the disturbance.

Among those officers was Edward Belcher.

Belcher, twenty-four, had been on the police force four years. He had been married three years. He was a 1965 graduate of Paschal High School and a junior at Texas Wesleyan College, studying sociology and history.

Six minutes after Belcher arrived at the scene he approached fellow officers Ronald G. Turner and J. R. Shaw on the parking lot.

A gunshot rang out, and Belcher dropped to the ground.

Shaw recalled: “He was walking towards us. He was less than ten feet away [when he was shot].”

Belcher had been shot once in the back of the head. He was dead. Officer Turner had been slightly wounded in the neck by fragments.

Star-Telegram reporter Bob Ray Sanders, who had arrived on the scene about three minutes earlier, said he heard one shot and saw Belcher and Turner fall.

The sound of the gunshot and the angle of the bullet entry wound told police officers the shot had been fired from the north. Tracing the trajectory of the bullet, police determined that the most obvious cover in that direction was a hamburger stand on the other side of East Berry Street. The killer had fired across the street from a distance of about six hundred feet. To hit Belcher from that distance at night, the gunman must have been a sniper using a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.

Sure enough, soon after the shooting a security guard at the Riverside Village Apartments—about six hundred feet north of the hamburger stand—saw a man carrying a rifle and ordered him to stop. The man dropped the rifle into a flower bed and ran. The security guard fired a shot at the fleeing man.

Police examined the recovered rifle. It was a .30-06 military-issue rifle modified for sports use. The rifle contained one spent cartridge and an otherwise full magazine.

The rifle was fitted with a telescopic sight.

(Soon after October 29 the Electric Circus closed and never reopened.)

After interviewing several witnesses police began to search for David Lee Nelson, who was on probation for a conviction for auto theft.

Fort Worth police homicide detective Oliver Ball said that to David Lee Nelson, a policeman’s badge that night was a bull’s-eye: “Everything indicates that he shot at a uniform without knowing the identity of his victim. He wanted to kill a policeman.”

Edward Belcher was the first Fort Worth police officer shot to death in the line of duty since detective Henry Cleveland was killed by a robbery suspect he was attempting to arrest in 1952.

On October 30 about 750 people, including one-third of the Fort Worth police force and two hundred police officers and firefighters from out of town, including seventy-five from Dallas, attended the funeral for officer Belcher.

David Lee Nelson was charged with murder as police searched for him.

On November 4 Nelson surrendered to Sheriff Lon Evans.

Nelson denied killing officer Belcher.

On November 11 a grand jury indicted Nelson.

On December 18 the state announced that it would seek the death penalty.

On January 8, 1973 David Lee Nelson pleaded not guilty in the sniper murder of officer Belcher as three snipers firing from atop a Howard Johnson hotel in New Orleans had killed six and injured seventeen.

Prosecutors in the Belcher case said they had dropped their intention to seek the death penalty after a Supreme Court ruling effectively outlawed capital punishment. Prosecutors instead would seek a life sentence against Nelson for murder with malice.

On January 9 testimony began before an all-white jury. Nelson’s defense attorney was Clifford Davis.

Key points in the testimony:

Roger Slane testified that he had been the employer of David Lee Nelson at a West Side restaurant. Slane said that about ten days before the Belcher shooting Nelson had showed him a rifle he had just bought. The rifle, Slane said, was a .30-06 similar to the reported murder weapon. Slane had terminated Nelson on the day before the shooting.
R. C. Phillips identified the murder weapon as the rifle that had been stolen from his pickup on October 17, 1971. He also identified as belonging to him a gun case that police found near the sniper’s suspected cover on East Berry.
Lee Lagrone, by then fifteen, testified that he and two other teenagers had stolen the murder weapon and had sold it to Nelson.

Frank Schiller, police crime lab director, testified that Nelson’s fingerprints were found on the murder weapon and on a shell casing in the rifle.

(The crime lab was not able to match the bullet that killed Belcher with the reported murder weapon.)

A sales clerk at nearby Ward’s Plaza testified that about eight days before the murder Nelson purchased a box of .30-06 bullets.

Debra Brooks testified that on the night of the shooting she saw Nelson in the Electric Circus.

Patty Clark testified that on the night of the shooting she saw Nelson carrying a rifle outside the Electric Circus but could not positively identify the murder weapon as the rifle she saw Nelson carrying.

Two witnesses, Robert Bynum and Ernie Corbin, identified Nelson as one of three men who parked in a car in front of the East Berry Street hamburger stand just before Belcher was shot. They said they saw Nelson open the car’s trunk and take out a rifle. They said that they were within twenty-five feet of Nelson and that, fearing gunplay, they took shelter in the hamburger stand.

While inside the hamburger stand they heard a “real loud” shot. They did not see who fired the shot but believed the shot came from behind the hamburger stand.

Riverside Village Apartments security guards testified that they saw a man who looked like Nelson carrying a rifle as he ran through the apartment complex.

One Riverside Village security guard testified that he stopped Nelson as Nelson ran through the complex after midnight on October 29. The guard questioned Nelson but—not yet aware that officer Belcher had been shot—concluded that Nelson had done nothing wrong and released him.

Soon after, a security guard found the murder weapon in a flower bed in the apartment complex.

Taking the witness stand, David Nelson denied shooting officer Belcher, denied owning the murder weapon but admitted that he owned a similar Springfield .30-06 rifle with a telescopic sight. Nelson said he bought his rifle in late September or early October in the Como area and denied having bought the murder weapon from the three teenagers who claimed they had sold it to him on October 17.

He claimed that his rifle had been in the custody of relatives at the time of the Belcher murder.

Nelson also admitted that he had been at the Electric Circus during the disturbance on October 28-29, 1971 but denied taking part in firing guns or throwing rocks or bottles. He said he was in the parking lot standing near officer Belcher when Belcher was shot.

Nelson testified that he ran to the Riverside Village Apartments, where security guards “threw down” (drew their weapons) on him but released him.

David Lee Nelson was found guilty of murder with malice and sentenced to life in prison at Huntsville.

In 1974 the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Nelson’s sentence.

He was paroled on May 20, 1983 at age thirty.

Officer Edward Belcher is buried in Greenwood Cemetery. He would be seventy-four years old.

Belcher’s name is inscribed, as is Cleveland’s, on the wall of the Fort Worth Police and Firefighters Memorial in Trinity Park.

Posts About Crime Indexed by Decade